Shattered Glass in Flower Beds
by Sorkari
Summary: Gardevoir is one of the only survivors of the plague that nearly wiped out her village and, subsequently, her culture. She escapes to a nearby kingdom and grows to bring honor to her extended family, so no one expects her of apostasy. Every new moon, she ventures to her old village to practice their old, heretical beliefs, which is how she meets a rogue knight of the same history.


**A/N:** An AU in which the pokemon are all humans and live in their own world free of trainers and actual animal-like pokemon.

I've been planning this for over two years but I never got around to writing it until now, so naturally, I forgot pretty much everything that I had planned, other than that I wanted Gardevoir and Gallade together. Apologies in advance because this chapter is mostly setup. Gallade appears in the next chapter though :)))))

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Gardevoir had never been closer to death.

One would assume that, after ten years, the experience would dull. For some reason, though, the heavy scent of decay still hung in her nostrils, the taste of acid still evident in the back of her throat, the delirious fog of fever and rot rendering her entirely oblivious to the world around her. It wasn't hard for a child to understand that the end of their small world was near.

The only thing she didn't understand was why she was one of the very few who lived.

Miraculously enough, her father lived through a majority of the plague, lived to see the worst of it all. It first came as lethargy, one that her father recognized in an instant, but he didn't dare shove a pillow over her face and smother her. It would have been a mercy, one that she had craved for a long while afterwards, when it was all over and nothing was left. The only thing a part of her that had died during that time was the hope she had, slowly withering away with each corpse she watched her father drag off to the burial ground. She'd sit there, propped up against her headboard until she was too weak to sit upright, in clear view of the pile of turgid corpses that grew by the day.

"Something bestowed a curse upon us," her mother told her. She was a remarkably beautiful woman. "It'll be a miracle to live through this." Her hand reached up to fuss with her hair, combing aside the sea foam green that had framed her delicate face. She was so frail, so gorgeously, tantalizingly frail. "I hope you do. I hope you live. I hope you'll be okay."

Gardevoir had a lot of hope, too, so much that she was blind enough to cling to her mother, even after the older woman had fallen ill. Her mother was one of the first to die. Not the very first, which would have been a true mercy. She lived long enough to see what became of the victims. And so did Gardevoir, just a few weeks later once her mother was gone and her father had a dangerously developed a lazy demeanor that was uncharacteristic of him.

 _There's no miracle in living,_ she'd spitefully muse, long after she had recovered. _Miracles don't exist._ Her first sight when her fever broke and she finally opened her eyes was not of the loving parents that she dreamed of or the food that she craved. There were still corpses outside her window that had gradually cleaned themselves, then distended with the fumes of decay. Just in the next room, her father had slipped out of consciousness for the last time. _Miracles never existed._

There were only three people that survived the plague, she later discovered, but their identities were unknown to her. Many had left, but not in time to escape the cruel tendrils of the plague. Only one had survived after leaving once the first few had fallen ill and had somehow lived. The other recovered. They were both gone by the time she had woken up, leaving a child behind that they assumed would be gone like the rest of the village.

They were a very distant village, being dozens of miles into the forest that surrounded the Dark Kingdom. She had somehow managed to reach it, scraped and bruised, her once long, silky hair reduced to a matted disaster. She doesn't remember how she passed through the gates. Perhaps the guard couldn't recognize her or which family she had come from because of the state she was in. Perhaps he hadn't heard what had happened. Perhaps he knew, but took pity on her. She didn't know. For a long while, she didn't know. All she knew then was that there was nothing for her, nothing besides the family that, surprisingly enough, had become nobility in recent generations.

They loved her at some point. They _loved_ her. They took her in, shielded her from the condescending remarks made by the lords and ladies of neighboring estates, and for awhile, she believed that they loved her. It wasn't until she had gotten comfortable enough to speak, brave enough to share what had lurked in her mind, that she believed otherwise.

At the very first mention of the small, yet insurmountably damnable word _magic_ , her aunt glared at her, her countenance filled with such vehement malice that it stung.

"Magic," her aunt started softly, tremulously, almost as if she had feared the mere whisper of it, "doesn't exist."

Gardevoir stared down at her lap, where her fingers lay intertwined, her skin singing beautifully with the undying symphony of unfathomable, unrelenting force that waited to be utilized. It called to her, urged her to ask back in a voice that, for the first time since arriving there, was higher than a pathetic mutter, "How could you think that magic doesn't exist when you came from the same village?"

The crimson in her aunt's eyes were so vividly obvious now, visible when they had widened at the ludicrousness of the question. Gardevoir continued, fueled by a white-hot anger that had finally returned to her, "How do you know? How, if you've never read the history books?"

And with that came a hard smack to the cheek that left the skin red and swollen for a couple of days. Her aunt had pulled her close, her grip leaving bruises on her ethereally pale skin. She could still hear the small, fierce hiss, "You could be _hanged_ for that here, heretic. Know your place."

Heretic?

It was a funny word, really. _Heretic._ A crime against a group of people. A crime against their _religion._ Another few bruises later and Gardevoir had finally learned how the society worked.

The truth?

You must be a heretic.

Logic?

You should be hanged for believing in that nonsense.

It was safest not to lie, but to keep quiet. It was also easiest to hold her tongue, to withhold information if need be, but never to outright _lie_.

Lying was a vital skill that she had learned much later.

The first time she tried to lie was, needless to say, an absolute failure. It was only a few days after she had turned fifteen when her aunt sent her to the market again, her fingers fussing with the silky ribbon that wrapped around the handle of her bread basket, when she told her first unsuccessful lie.

There were gaps between the houses that led to channels of alleyways, ones that she eventually made a habit of visiting. The first time was because a stray taunted her, and after that, her visits were sporadic, increasing in frequency until she took a detour every visit to the market she would make. That day was particularly busy, the footsteps and calls of merchants echoing faintly in the alleyway as she tore a loaf of bread into several pieces for the strays that neared her. Her only warning occurred too quickly for her to react; their eyes, focused pleadingly at her, shifted and grew impossibly wide before they bolted just as a hand had touched her shoulder.

Heat surged in the pit of her fluttering chest as she whipped around, branching violently up the column of the expanse of her throat and leaving her mouth in an echoing cry. It radiated from her lips, cut short as she was shoved backward from the sheer force of it. It took her a moment to come down from the high, shakily propping herself up on her scraped elbows as she stared incredulously at the man in front of her. The crimson of his eyes flickered as he stared dazedly back.

They refocused, trained dangerously on her with a fire that smoldered as deeply as the ring of gold on his forehead. Fear dug its cruel nails into her chest, and for a moment, she couldn't utter more than a wheezing whisper, couldn't even begin to beg for mercy. Lord Umbreon sat up, and justly, she scrambled backwards, abruptly stopping when she heard his tremulous murmur, "What _was_ that?"

Her heartbeat had slowed from its relentless pace, calming just enough for her to recognize the undeniable tendrils of fear that lurked on his countenance. The shock at harming the both of them had ebbed into sheer disbelief that a member of the _Umbreon_ family had known any semblance of fear. Every movement she made was regarded with a cynical glare, one that she was familiar with when she learned to gain the trust of the strays that she fed.

She offered with a croon as soft as she could possibly muster, "I'm sorry."

Her voice was still undeniably tense, but it was a gentle enough hum to call to him. His stiff posture notably relaxed as he repeated breathlessly, "You're sorry?" The rhetorical question elicited another jump in her chest, severe enough to burn. "I don't - I wouldn't be sorry for something so -" he licked his lips, and for a moment, she held her breath. There were many ways to describe her nature, many of which echoed cruelly in her ears in her aunt's voice, and she took a guess. _Blasphemous,_ perhaps. She exhaled sharply as he finished with a laugh, "so _amazing_."

Gardevoir neared him, but she didn't dare touch such a remarkable lord of the kingdom, didn't dare reach out to help dust off his coat with an unworthy hand. She wrung her hands together, unsure of what to do with them, and absentmindedly echoed with a giddy laugh, "Amazing?"

He gave a timid nod, confirming with an equally shy, yet genuine smile, "Absolutely amazing."

He helped her up after that, seemingly carefree over the fact that he had offered his hand to a lower noble, a practically nonexistent family in the society that his own family had never acknowledged beforehand. Later that evening, when she had cowered in the menacing shadow of her aunt after her initial excuse had failed miserably, the doorbell that saved her.

She followed pusillanimously behind her aunt to the front door when the butler had called, at a loss for words as the youngest Umbreon that she had encountered earlier offered her aunt a respectful bow.

"The least I could do was apologize for running in to your niece," Umbreon said with an unctuous smile.

It was almost painful; his register was sickeningly saccharine for his lie, his mask and intimidating status convincing her aunt that it was a genuine explanation. But when her aunt turned to her with a ludicrous expression, there was nothing fake about the knowing smile that he gave her. It did not promise understanding, but _acceptance_ , and while it was a foreign and undeniably frightening concept, it left her inexplicably giddy. It was more than she could have ever hoped for, and much more than she could have ever dared to ask for.

It wasn't until a couple of years later that she was promised something as groundbreaking, as breathtaking, as inexplicably life-changing as _understanding._


End file.
